go tool dist: FAILED: not a Git repo; must put a VERSION file in $GOROOT

[Lonnie TC]

Hi All,

I hope that everyone is doing well today.

I am working on a Golang project to port go-pmem over to MSYS2 using MinGW 64:

https://github.com/jerrinsg/go-pmem

In trying to build the patched Go distro toolchain, I am getting some strange error in the build that I do not know how to handle and am hoping that someone can answer this for me.

go tool dist: FAILED: not a Git repo; must put a VERSION file in $GOROOT

any help would be truly appreciate.

Have a great day,

Lonnie

[Ian Lance Taylor]

I don't know what go-pmem is, but a Go distribution should have a file
$GOROOT/VERSION that contains the version number of the release. If
you download the sources of, say, the Go 1.19 release, you will see a
VERSION file. For development purposes, if that VERSION file does not
exist, the Go build will pull the version from the git repo. You seem
to have Go sources that are not in a git repo and also do not have a
VERSION file. That setup is not expected or supported. The simple
fix is to create your own VERSION file.

Ian

[twp...@gmail.com]

For info, this is broken in Fedora 39, released a day or two ago:

$ docker pull fedora:latest

$ docker run -it fedora:latest /bin/bash

[root@01330dfaac82 /]# dnf update && dnf install -y golang

...

[root@01330dfaac82 /]# go version
go version go1.21.3 linux/amd64

[root@01330dfaac82 /]# go tool dist list

go tool dist: FAILED: not a Git repo; must put a VERSION file in $GOROOT

[twp...@gmail.com]

Reported to Fedora at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2248782